Dear developers,
I respectfully submit this general resolution proposal to your consideration.
(this GR proposal supersedes the proposal in <20090318235044.GA30722@yellowpig>)
Asking for seconds,
(please CC me)
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
This General Resolution is made in accordance with Debian Constitution 4.1.5,
however it overrides a decision of the FTP masters made in
<87k5aovzzi.fsf@delenn.ganneff.de> [1].
[1] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/11/msg00097.html
========= Text of the GR ===================
The Debian project resolves that softwares licensed under the GNU Affero
General Public License are not free according to the Debian Free Software
Guideline.
========= End of the text ==================
RATIONALE (to be amended if necessary):
1. The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is essentially the GNU General
Public License with the following additional clause reproduced below.
See http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl.html for the full text
of the license.
""
13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the
Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting
with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such
interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your
version
by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no
charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of
software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for
any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is
incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to
link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the
GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the
resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part
which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain
governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
""
2. This clause is incompatible with Section 3. of the Debian Free Software
Guideline:
2.1 This clause restricts how you can modify the software.
Doing a simple modification to a AGPL-covered software might require you to
write a substantial amount of extra code to comply with this clause.
2.2 This clause forces the developer modifying the software to incur cost.
A developer modifying the software and distributing the modified version
need to incur the cost of providing access to the Corresponding Source from
a network server as long as at least one person is using the software and
this for all published modifications, even long after the developer stopped
using and/or distributing the software.
2.2. While this clause does restrict mere use of the software, instead it
creates liabilities for people modifying the software, even if they
distributed their modified version in source form, with respect to the way
the software perform on user systems.
-- Modifying the software can unwillingly introduce a bug that cause it
not to comply with this clause.
-- A user of the modified version can mis-install it, mis-configure it or
run it in an untested environment where it does not comply with this
clause.
-- A user of the modified version can use it in a configuration that cause
it to fail to comply with this clause (for example using a reverse proxy
that remove link to the source code from the html output).
3. This clause is incompatible with Section 6. of the Debian Free Software
Guideline.
3.1 This clause does not allow you to modify the software to perform tasks
where complying with it is not technically feasible, for example:
-- The code is modified to run on an embedded system with tight size limit.
-- The code is modified to interact with the user using a network connection
with extremely low throughput.
-- The code is modified to interact with the user using a network protocol
that does not allow to display a prominent offer.